blogthecat

When darkness falls

Most people lucky enough to have spent time in Africa have made their way to one of its most beautiful countries, Kenya. My family used to vacation there when we lived in southern Africa in the 1970s, and though my memories of those trips are now soft around the edges, my heart still feels Kenya.

It feels it in colour (golden, accented by anything bright), music (my brother dancing like a madman to the beat of a local band, The Daffodils, whose The Lion Sleeps Tonight—uyimbuwe, uyimbuwe—was better than any version I’ve ever heard), taste (fresh-caught scampi sizzling in garlic butter), and smell (the Indian Ocean off Malindi, where I nearly touched one of the most dangerous fish in the world, the stonefish, in a shallow coral pool). But it feels it in a less tangible sense as well: I remember Kenya as safe, happy, and warm.

Without much doubt, this deeper imprint of Kenya is at least partly due to these trips being times in which my family felt particularly good to me. I associate Kenya with relaxation and tranquility on a personal level. So in expressing my sadness at the news that a jagged gash of violence and hatred has ripped through Kenya, I won’t say “isn’t that awful—it was so idyllic at one time.” It couldn’t be idyllic, given its post-colonial legacy of roughly 40 ethnic groups and more than half the population in extreme poverty.

And yet … and yet to me and to everyone I’ve ever talked to who has gone to Kenya, the country has steadfastly symbolized hope, despite the odds. It isn’t just me who is shocked by the chaos that has overtaken the country—Kenyans themselves are incredulous.

Stephanie Nolen, the Globe and Mail’s insightful and frighteningly brave African correspondent, had a piece in the paper last Saturday (“Into the Valley of Death") in which she described her harrowing road trip through the country to try to discover the root of the madness. On this trip, which included a stop at her driver’s burned-down house complete with the corpses of a mother and baby, Nolen can’t find one person who can tell her why the violence erupted. It seems to be some infernal combination of a contested election, desperation for economic reforms, and latent ethnic tensions. Nolen concludes the piece by asking her travelling companions, both Kenyan, if anything they saw on the trip surprised them. One responded, “with bitter wonderment in his voice.” His answer: “That this is Kenya, and you cannot move from place to place. That there is no control. That people are killing just like anything.”

Of course, one outcome of this tragedy is that it will reiterate the image of Africa as a savage and hopeless continent to the rest of the world. Play a word association game with Africa as the original word—an honest game—and you will get something like drought, AIDS, machetes, famine, and corruption. The words come fast and heavy. I know. But I also know that they must be contested. They must be balanced with other ideas, even when these ideas seem elusive. Because Africa is not just dark. And so I leave you—leave me—with this gorgeous picture of Africa—Malawi to be exact—that my friend Francesca’s husband, Chris, took about a year ago. (Chris is not only a fantastic photographer, he is an AIDS doctor and researcher; he and Francesca are currently living in Malawi). This is Africa, too.

Household gone wrong

Okay, I think this will be the first literal venture into blogging the cat. Craig is coming home tomorrow at noon from China. I have missed him inordinately, and he will be tired and jet-lagged. Thus: plans for a big clean to welcome him home. Nothing wrong with that.

I went out to get bits and pieces for my clean (including White Fig vacuum beads from Restoration Hardware—this is serious!). I am back, and raring to go. But there is one problem. Los gatos (our cats, Baizely and Franny) are all tucked in, heads on pillows, sheets up to their chinny-chin-chins. I don’t want to bother them with vacuuming. They really hate it.

Baizely and Franny sleep 22 hours a day. They demand and get food pretty much whenever they’re conscious. My husband is coming back. I want to be a good wife. This is so messed up. I am whipped.

How to quit cold turkey

So I’m just getting used to the fact that I’m pregnant … YUP! … all curled up and cozy in bed on the weekend with the Saturday Globe when I get hit with Nadia the Siberian baby. 17.1 pounds.

Do you see the horror on her wee neighbour’s face? Imagine her mother's expression as she gave birth. I, for one, sat straight up and screamed when I saw the story. Especially when I read the mother’s explanation of what she ate to produce Nadia:

"We don't have the money for special foods, so I just ate potatoes, noodles and tomatoes."

You saw my recent entry on fries. If only it had stopped there. But the fries just led to the next two fixations: baked potatoes and Big Bowl noodle soups. Potatoes and noodles, potatoes and noodles … all I want, all I need. Until Nadia.

Cows

This weekend I ate breakfast with two cows. Not the moo kind, but humans of the female gender who are miserable and make it their mission to sour the air around everyone else in their orbit.

The occasion was the morning meal at a lovely B&B we were staying at. Sometimes you get lucky with your co-guests at B&Bs (and we had, the day before), while sometimes things go the other way. This breakfast things went the other way.

Craig and I sat down to the table with generosity in our hearts, warmed by the delicious sleep we had had in the gigantic bed of perfect firmness upstairs and by the fire cackling away just beside us. The forced, false expressions on the faces of two women already seated tempered our moods a little, but it took a few minutes to register how foul the women truly were.

Each took up different positions on the bovine spectrum: Cow #1 took up more oxygen than the room contained, preening and casting critical glances at me from her seat across the table. Cow #2 exuded insecurity and weakness, flinging herself awkwardly into the conversation the odd time her companion shut up for more than a nanosecond.

The cows reached a pinnacle of horridness during a conversation with one of our gracious hosts. Bob (let’s call him) was explaining the ordeal his partner Paul’s daughter-in-law had just undergone in delivering a little girl to the world. The mother was thirty-seven, and she was two weeks past her due date; there was also another complication that necessitated a course of drugs. As he was telling the story, he passed a few photos of the beautiful little girl who despite these complications, is doing just fine.

At which point the cows decided to proffer their judgments into the room:

Cow #1: “Thirty-seven!”

Cow #2: “Two weeks late, and DRUGS! Not good for the baby, not good at all.”

And then, the capper.

Cow #1 blurts out, “Did she go under the lights?”

Bob doesn’t understand. “Sorry?”

Cow #1 holds up one of the pictures, and exclaims “The baby. She’s YELLOW.”

I don’t remember what Bob said to this. When I cringe, sometimes my ears get all swollen and block out sound. I do know that I skulked off to the living room and found solace burying my head in the fur of one of Bob’s adorable but smelly dogs.

To rinse or not to rinse

It might be said of me that I’m, um, a bit queasy about some food. I’d even guess that harsher language has been applied, perhaps even by my mother who, when I first stopped eating meat some 15 years ago, used to sneak in chicken consommé to whatever dish we would be eating, she was so annoyed. In many families, including mine, cooking for someone is closely tied to loving them, and my saying no to meat in some ways constituted an emotional rejection. We’re mostly over that now (I think!) but I do get how off-putting self-imposed dietary restrictions or fussiness can be.

I am trying to be less finicky with food. I ate a veggie dog just the other day that had both fraternized with chicken and tumbled onto the very-much-used-by-dogs grass along Kits beach during a fun barbeque. I had my priorities straight—don’t be a loser and spoil the great mood by thinking too much about what might or might not have attached itself to my dinner. I was very cool (relatively speaking), and it was good for me—I just wiped it off and devoured it.

But I'm not going to pretend that I'm not slightly neurotic about the circumstances that need to be in place for me to feel good about eating food.

For example, fish: if fish is to be cooked in our house, it must be thoroughly, blatantly (if done by Craig) rinsed and patted down before cooking. Not totally calm about eating fish, I need this ritual to set the stage for enjoying the meal. It's a clean thing, I guess. But today, I came upon news from the blogosphere that repudiates this process. Helen Rennie, scribe of the neat blog Beyond Salmon, writes in answer to a reader’s question about the merits of rinsing fish:

“You don't need to rinse fish, chicken, pork, or any other meat before cooking. Not only does it not get rid of bacteria, it spreads bacteria (if water splashes from the sink in the process of rinsing). What kills bacteria much more effectively is cooking.”

Thoughts? (Oh, and if they’re about some of my peccadillos about food/germs—I already know they’re annoying. I’m more interested in the no-rinse theory. Do you rinse your fish? If you do, would you stop because of the above information?)

Sexy back?

“The booty is the new boobie,” proclaims the Globe and Mail’s Deirdre Kelly in last week’s Style section. One of Kelly’s interviewees, a “physician” (who performs plastic surgery) asserts: “The moment you are over 30, the bum starts sinking down and with the new technologies we are able to lift the bum and give the bum that appearance of a bunny’s [yes, that’s right … a bunny’s]—round, perky, and sag-free.”

I am over 30. Apparently, my bum has been sinking for six years now, so I guess it’ll be down around my knees before long. Unless I take measures—i.e., thousands of dollars—to shape my bum like a bunny’s.

I happen to be reading Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, a 1963 book that explores how women during that era were (quite successfully) urged to locate their identity within the home, within the role of nurturer to their husbands and children. The section I’m in right now is looking at the editorial lineups of women’s magazines in the 50s, which included such titles as:

• Femininity Begins at Home
• It’s a Man’s World Maybe
• Have Babies While You’re Young
• How to Snare a Male
• Should I Stop Work When We Marry?
• Are You Training Your Daughter to Be a Wife?
• Do Women Have to Talk So Much?
• Don’t Be Afraid to Marry Young

Now, I love the Globe—love the Style section. But there is something insidious about Canada's national newspaper (which I read carefully and which influences my thinking) carrying a half-satirical, half-serious article about the lengths women are going to in order to knife and inject their bums to current trends in sexy. And just a few weeks back, the prominent style personality Jeanne Beker had a column in about the excellent procedure she had to depuff her eyes.

I’m not naïve—I know that pointing out all the ways we women are failing at being sexy, and then suggesting quick fixes, is the bread and butter of women’s media. But it seems to me the focus is pretty intense right now—and getting a lot more attention in media I usually trust.

I have a fair idea of what Freidan would say about this.

As for me, my intellectual side is on guard against pop culture edicts about what I have to look like. But that’s not my only side. I confess to feeling slightly overwhelmed about all the things I could be doing to make myself more feminine, more acceptable. The things a lot of other women are doing. To more and more parts of their bodies.

The Feminine Mystique rears its ugly head again.